Fish and chips stand on the endangered list

Mountain Woman -- I had visions of Ma Kettle with a five
o'clock shadow -- says hello.

Mountain Woman -- I had visions of Ma Kettle with a five o'clock shadow -- says hello.

She offers a dainty hand in greeting. She is disappointingly un-mountainous. She is not even hillock-sized. She is blond and petite and drives a minivan. It is parked outside and has a vanity licence plate that reads "MT WOMN."

Mountain Woman's real name is Lynne Cook. She is 50-ish, and the mother of two. How she got the name Mountain Woman is a story we shall get to. Wouldn't you know, it involves a Mountain Man.

Like any mountain, she is a landmark, at least to a certain audience that travels the Sea to Sky Highway. For the last 24 years, Lynne has operated the Mountain Woman Take-Out stand in Britannia Beach.

It's the little joint housed in an old school bus, which Lynne bought from the North Vancouver school board. Lynne bought it for $9,000 in 1984 and painted it blue. It's just past the Britannia Mine Museum, and cheek by jowl to the highway.

"We [her husband and her] were looking for a cheap place to live, so I moved from Coquitlam and when we got here, I thought, 'This is the worst move I've ever made in my life. This is a one-year pit stop and then I'm done.'

"That was 24 years ago."

She had just had her first child at the time, she says, and she needed a part-time job while she raised her son. So her husband thought she should open a take-out stand.

Thus, the bus.

"We started if off as just a weekend business, and then as business grew, we added on a porch, and then enclosed the porch in glass, and then added on a deck.

"Now, we're open year-round."

When they first opened in 1984, she says, her husband insisted that if he was going to work there then it would have to be called "Mountain Man Take-Out."

But then came their divorce in 1989.

"When I became an 'ex,'" Lynne says, "I thought it was time I changed the name. So," and she says this without irony "I put the 'wo' in Mountain Man."

The sign above the bus now reads:

"MOUNTAIN woMAN"

The business prospered. She went from weekends to daily, and then year-round. She began to attract a clientele that included high rollers on their way to Whistler. CEOs and stockbrokers would stop in. The likes of Murray Pezim ate there. It has survived a grease fire which almost gutted the entire bus, and a flood that almost took her picnic tables out to sea. It has suffered its small share of robberies -- usually, from desperate itinerants looking for food -- and from one guy who, unclear on the rules of B&Es, jimmied open a window, started up the grill, made himself a hamburger and milkshake and left behind $2 in payment.

Which may not be the case for much longer. For those 24 years, the Mountain Woman Take-out stand has sat on a ministry of transport right of way beside the highway. Her lease with the MoT was advantageous, to say the least: she paid no rent.

But the lease also had a 30-day notice clause. Any time it wanted, the MoT could give Lynne notice and she would have to vacate the right-of-way in 30 days' time.

For more than two decades, the Mountain Woman operated in a kind of benign obscurity. Britannia Beach was a hard-luck case, and needed all the commerce it could get. Mountain Woman attracted tourists and paying customers. Its status as a landmark even got it written up in the Lonely Planet travel guide.

But then came the 2010 Olympics bid and the Sea to Sky Highway expansion. Then a developer announced plans for a development of 65,000 square feet of retail space in Britannia Beach on a property directly behind the Mountain Woman Take-out stand. Britannia Beach was changing from a backwater to a rejuvenated piece of the Sea to Sky corridor.

And the Mountain Woman Take-out suddenly came into MoT's view. In late April, Lynne received a letter from the ministry which read, in part:

"In accordance with termination of this permit, we must advise, all structures and facilities associated with Mountain Woman Restaurant are to be removed, from the highway right of way by September 30, 2008 and the site is to be restored to its original condition."

According to MoT spokesman Dave Crebo, the Mountain Woman's proximity to the highway, which is about 10 feet away from its front deck, became a safety issue. With the increased traffic that the highway improvement is expected to bring, and the increase in traffic expected to be entering Britannia Beach, Mountain Woman was just too close for comfort. There would be liability issues to think about.

Lynne isn't sure what she can do.

"I don't really know yet. Mountain Woman, looking for a new job?"

The MoT, Crebo says, is more than willing to sit down with Lynne to help her find a new location, though it probably wouldn't include the bus, Lynne says. And she isn't inclined, she says, to buy space in the new retail development at her age -- the start-up costs, she feels, would be too great.

She started a petition to save Mountain Woman, and has gathered 1,200 names since June.

But bigger petitions have failed to move provincial governments intent on their own designs, and this provincial government, intent on turning the Sea to Sky corridor into a showpiece for the 2010 Olympics, is moving mountains to do so.

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.